The sad fact is, Americans love gossip and the juicy dish on how the other half lives. For example, compare and contrast the news coverage surrounding the deaths of Anna Nicole Smith, a Playboy Paymate and personal train wreck vs. Saddam Hussein, the architect of the Iraqi genocide and planned assassination of former President, George Bush Sr. Over the past few days we have been inundated with main stream media reports and conjecture about Anna Nicole Smiths tragic demise from a supposed drug overdose. Meanwhile, back on the landscape of world politics¦ when former dictator, Saddam Hussein has condemned to hang just a few short months go, it was business as usual at the major networks. His death was reported amid the rest of the daily news. My point? Gossip sells. Celebreality sells. The juicy details of the most tragic lives are what we gobble up with our less than silver spoons. So, use it. Use celebrity and gossip to give your real estate blog some real appeal.

Real estate blogs can get boring quickly. Its easy to fill them with dry market reports, school statistics and new listings, but thats not what a blog is about or why a reader would visit your real estate blog.   People expect more from a blog than a website. They expect in depth, local information, quality tutorials on the specifics of how to buy and sell houses, neighborhood happenings that only insiders would know, details about where new construction is planned, etc. Basically, as a real estate blogger, to keep your blog fresh, you have to become a journalist of sorts, breaking local news and sharing community gossip. 

Read also: Killing Me Softly With Your Blog

Whos winning the real estate blog battle for engaging content?

If you want examples of blogs getting it right, check out these mavericks. Each of them has discovered the secret sauce to writing content that interests readers and keeps them coming back for more. 

Sellsius: Joe and Rudy can always be relied on for the wacky and wild news that tickles the funny bone.

Future of Real Estate Marketing: need to know whats happening in the wild world of real estate technology and marketing? Joel has it covered. Were pretty convinced he sold his soul to the devil to mine some of this information because he is always the first to break the latest and greatest industry innovations.

Christine Adler: Palm Beach insider, Christine Adler digs for gold weighing in on everything from Donald Trumps recent criminal encounter with the city to a local tennis stars fight for the US Open title.

NYHouses4Sales: Brassy NY real estate pro, Christine Forgione has gone where no other blogger has gone, inside the Billy Joel home sale. Talk about celebrity gossip steeped in real estate!

Zillow Blog: Just when you thought Zillow was only about Zestimates. The Zillow blog recently peeked main stream interest with their tour of celebrity heart break homes.

Big Time Listings: Want to know what celebrities are buying and selling homes? This is your source.

Bloodhound: Opinionated curmudgeon, Greg Swan is always good for a think piece that will tickle your sardonic funny bone. (FYI: keep a thesaurus handy when reading these)

What kind of gossip works on a real estate site?

1. Celebrity home buys and sales in your area
2. Celebrity activities in your area
3. Local celebrity news
4. Local politics/school happenings
5. Local construction projects; whos building, who might build, are they building near existing residents, is the town
6. Local politics

Read also: Pimp my blog; becoming the guilty pleasure

How to find gossip and strange news on the Internet:

OK, OK, I know asking you to out and break news stories is a tall order. But fear not, I have some sure fire ways to help you find the wild, wacky, strange and tacky news taking place in your area.

1. Read your local paper: Read the gossip/social column
2. Where to find weird news: forgetfoo.com, attuworld.com
3. Where to find celebrity news: idontlikeyouinthatway.com, thesuperficial.com, lipstick.com, perezhilton.com
4. How to build RSS feeds that will deliver all the latest local celebrity/strange news right to your email or RSS Reader: Go to Google News. Type in your farm area and 'gossip' or 'celebrity news' or 'some other local celebrity term,' etc. For example, here in Southwest Florida, we have a Red Sox Training camp, so here is my search for 'Red Sox Gossip.' Now, to simply create my RSS feed, I just click on the little RSS link on the left hand side of the Google menu. Here is my feed. If I simply add that to my feed reader, anytime new news appears about the Red Sox, I will get it auto delivered instantly. Cool, huh? 

Where to market your gossip-y news

I dont know about you but to me all this hard work is about traffic.  So, now that youve written some gossip-y content that will engage your readers, youll need to market the heck out of it.  So, here are the places you seed your content to the world to increase your traffic:

Shoot gossip off to the number one gossip aggregator, Lipstick

Submit real estate news to Real Estate Voices

NewsVine is a great aggregator to submit just about anything to

Digg, always reliable but especially so for gossip or pop culture news

Read also: Using social bookmarking to drive traffic to your real estate blog

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